Archives For July 2014

When Serdar and I first talked about building a national collection of certified election results, we had a very specific audience in mind: the two of us. It seemed like every two years (or more frequently), one or both of us would spend time gathering election results data as part of our jobs (me at The New York Times, Serdar then at The Washington Post). We wanted to create a project that both of us could use, and we knew that if we found it useful, others might, too.

The New York Times

In the world of software development, using your own work is called eating your dog food, and we’ve done just that. While we’re nowhere near finished, I am happy to report that OpenElections data has proven useful to at least half of the original intended audience. Both last week and this week, The Upshot, a new politics and policy site at The Times that I work on, used results data from Mississippi collected by OpenElections to dig into the Republican primary and runoff elections for U.S. Senate. The analyses that Nate Cohn did on voting in African-American precincts would not have been possible using the PDF files posted by the Mississippi Secretary of State. We needed data, and we (and you) now have data.

We’ve completed data entry of precinct-level results for the 2012 general election and the 2014 Republican primary runoff elections, plus special elections from 2013, and we’re working on converting more files into data (we just got our first contributions from volunteers, too!). These are just the raw results as the state publishes them; we haven’t yet published them out using our own results format (but that’s coming soon for Maryland and a few other states). We provide the raw results for states that have files requiring some pre-processing – usually image PDFs or other formats that can’t be pulled directly into our processing pipeline.

The Mississippi example is exactly the kind of problem that we hoped OpenElections would help solve, and it’s only the beginning for how election results data could be used. Once we begin publishing results data, we’d love to hear how you use it, too. In the meantime, if you have some time, there’s more Mississippi data to unlock!

As we get the first few states’ data processed and ready to release, we are building an interface to deliver it to you, and to show our progress as we go. The live site (above) now shows metadata work to date, and the volunteers involved. Soon you will be able to toggle between this view and a map of the current condition of results data (below). Clicking on each state will show you details on the most cleaned version of available data.

The color coding on this new map will change as we get more states online with ‘raw’ results, and fully cleaned data (what you see here is hypothetical and just to illustrate how the map will work). When we say ‘raw’, we really mean results that reflect the data provided by state elections officials. These results are only available at the reporting levels provided by the states and fields like party and candidate names have not been standardized. These results do have standardized field names, so you will be able to more easily load and analyze the data across states. We will get as many states fully cleaned as we can, but our baseline goal for this year is to wire up and make available most of the data in a ‘raw’ state.

As we build the data interface, we would love to know what you think. Is the terminology we are using clear to you? Is the interaction clear? Is there anything else you would like to see here?

If you click on the ‘Detailed Data’ link on the data map page, you will get to this download page showing all the races for the state you have chosen. You can download results at a variety of reporting levels, depending on what is available for this state. We will include rows in this view for all processed data (clean and raw) as well as any races we haven’t processed yet, just so that you know they exist.

Above the download table there is a slider that both gives you an overview of all the races available for a state, and a way to select just a specific date range for which to browse detailed results. You can filter results by race type – such as President, Governor, State Legislative races, etc.. If there are any other ways that you need to access the data, or if anything about this interface could be clearer, please let us know!

We will be building out a preliminary version of this interface in the next couple of weeks, and will revise it further based on what we hear from you.